I know I’m not alone in this (though I don’t know how popular of an opinion it is), but one of my greatest frustrations with this game is that my own personal advancement and progress is gated by what people do that control towns. If a Company decides to stop running upgrades on the Town Boards, or stops paying its taxes for the territories it owns, stuff can get wrecked that I need to not be wrecked. I already left a server where childish drama from the company that controlled Everfall and a couple other core regions completely screwed over my own progress on crafting.
Now, I get that this is an MMO, and one that actually places an incredibly high amount of focus on the “Multiplayer” aspect of that, so my suggestion tries to keep that in mind:
Remove the upkeep and upgrades of, at least, crafting and refining stations from the responsibilities of ruling companies, and instead put it as the responsibility of the general playerbase.
Do this by changing the town board. Instead, it lists all 10 stations, and has quests we can do to improve the “condition” of the station.
At max condition, the station upgrades (if not already tier 5). At tier 5, it can continue to gain “Condition”, maybe up to a cap.
To keep the “grind” in, every hour, have each station lose about 5% condition. This keeps the playerbase that uses that town engaged to make sure everything stays in good condition.
That would probably be enough that you do not want Invasions to downgrade stations anymore. They could still wreck defensive fortifications, but they don’t need to wreck stations.
Defensive fortifications would then be the sole responsibility of the governing Company. The same for Town Buffs. It could simply be a coin cost to upgrade/activate those.
As a way to make the outer regions more enticing, both for players and governing companies, they could have a higher starting tier for their stations and/or have a lower/slower rate of Condition decay.
This also has the added benefit of making it a bit easier for small servers to keep stations up, as Invasions aren’t wrecking stuff anymore. The rate of decay could even scale a bit with the Server’s current population rating (low/med/high).
Personally, I’d rather see the crafting station tier system go away. If someone has done the grind to raise their crafting to a certain level they should be able to always craft at that level. I think the idea of decay is interesting, but on low pop servers (or areas nobody really sets up shop) it would drive me crazy to have to do town board missions for an hour to offset the decay just to craft something I just spent a couple of hours to grind the materials to make.
A fair concern. My last bullet point tried to address low pop servers a bit. A modifier that scales in real time with the amount of people on the server. The fewer logged in, the more gains you make, and the lower the decay. Probably would need a crazy amount of tuning, though.
I forgot to make a point for the unpopular regions. They could also simply benefit from lower decay and higher gains to upgrade them. Or you could do something really wild, like based off how many unique users were making things at a given station, it could have its Condition gains and decay scale (the more users, the less gains and more decay). I’m just kind of spitballing with that last idea.
I also agree. I would rather see it go away - or be drastically reworked. If I need a station that is too low, I don’t go out and stop everything just to grind, and even if I did, how much impact would that even have? This grind is also gated by the fact new missions take time to respawn. No, if a station is low, hold off on crafting/play the limited space inventory game/craft at the next town.
It is a good idea on paper, and if re-tooled may become something cool, but right now in practice it is tedious, unrewarding, and decreases overall flow and fun of the game for me.
Your proposition takes in to account the impact of invasions which is great. I’d like to see the invasion system reworked a bit as well so maybe invasions can be easier to handle/avoided if the corrupted areas are kept in check. (Maybe that’s already how it works?) That way lower level players can contribute (instead of just 50+) to lower decay levels or offset them completely.
I hate station levels. I cannot process high tier materials at outposts or in most high level regions due to low level stations. I need to move often between several towns because invasions and wars keep downgrading the stations I need.
I wish we got mobile stations (similar to camp or perhaps upgraded camp) we could build in the wild…
Anyway, I think that stations should be levelled up, but not downgraded, as it is, it forces me to spend most of my time crafting in Windsward and Everfall. And occasionally move elsewhere after large invasion wave.
Cant agree more the server in on now is pretty much dead and everything is downgrading everywhere to the point its impossable to craft anything. we have no more T5 stations on the map and soon the t4 will be gone